Pistols & Pies (Sweet Bites Book 2) (Sweet Bites Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF

friends before stopping at a nearby table to divvy up the booty. “I guess they want it,” I said to Michael.
    “Yeah. Who wouldn’t?” He turned his head to the guys. “Hey, you losers better save me some!”
    “Yeah, yeah,” a male voice floated back to us, but I wasn’t sure which guy it came from. Michael seemed to think it was good enough, though, because he followed me to a table under the shade.
    “I hear Detective Tingey’s giving you a hard time,” I said when he settled in across from me. I tried to act casual as I covertly adjusted the tape recorder I had turned on after I got out of my car. I decided he wouldn’t respond as calmly if I was taking notes and I wanted to be able to remember what he said later.
    “Yeah, stupid cops, always looking to pin things on an easy target.” The words sounded parroted, as if he’d said them a lot of times, or as if he’d heard them a lot.
    From his friends or his ‘unconventional’ father? I made a mental note to look into his father more. “I know how that feels. Tingey thought I might have been the killer when the bridesmaid died at a wedding I worked at last spring.”
    “You? Really? Miss white bread, I work at a bakery, straight from bonnie old England?”
    I chuckled. “Don’t call me white bread. I know what that means, and I’m more interesting than that. Besides, my mom’s parents are Guatemalan, and I can speak Spanish.” That was a bit of a stretch. I had learned some Spanish growing up, but since I only remember meeting my mother’s mother once in my whole life, she wasn’t really responsible for my slightly better than terrible Spanish skills. The staff in the hotel kitchen, on the other hand—they could take a lot of credit for my spotty and somewhat creative vocabulary. Chances were this kid wouldn’t know better, though.
     “I’m just sayin’.” He shrugged as if he wasn’t embarrassed by my comeback, but the tips of his ears turned pink.
    “Yeah. I know what you’re sayin’. Don’t take things for granted, though. There’s more to people than you think. Take you for instance.” I leaned forward slightly on the table, hoping the recorder in my pocket was picking up all of this.
    He lifted a palm toward me. “Let’s leave me out of it.”
    “Let’s not, since you’re the reason I’m here. Your mom thinks you’re innocent—of this murder, at least. I hear you and Eric weren’t exactly buddies, though.”
    “You sound like that cop. So I hated Eric. He was a creep.” He went on to use several colorful words that I hadn’t heard since leaving the hotel job. “I hated him, yeah. Big deal. He always thought everything had to be done a certain way—his way. A guy couldn’t even have a personality around him. It was like living with the Borg.”
    That reference surprised me because he didn’t look like a sci-fi geek—especially one who watched reruns from the 80s. But what did I know? “So tell me where you were the day he died.”
    “I was here.” He rolled his eyes at me. “Man, I was supposed to be at the big shindig. I told my mom I would be. It was Eric’s big day .” He emphasized the words to show just how little he cared. “But he got on my case that morning and I just couldn’t stand it, so I came here, hung with the guys all afternoon.”
    “These guys?”
    “No, just some guys. People come and go, you know? We don’t all hang together all the time.” Michael shrugged. “I hang with whoever, you know? I don’t care who they are.”
    I wondered how much of this was real and how much a façade. Lenny had been all façade when I met him. “You remind me of a guy I know back in Chicago.”
    “Yeah, is he amazingly popular and incredibly handsome too?” He smiled as if he thought he was being charming.
    “No, not much. But he has a girl who really cares about him, a career he loves and he’s straightened his life out. First he had to spend some time in county lockup to figure out he